AMM
“In The Realm Of Nothing Whatever”
From AMMMusic 1966
(Matchless) 1989

Keith Rowe’s painting of a yellow lorry, careening across the sleeve of the group’s Elektra debut, is still the first thing many listeners associate with AMM. Put the LP on, though, and the harsh electroacoustic noise that roars from the speaker is an odd fit with the jacket’s wry, cartoonish aesthetic. Pick up the expanded 1989 reissue, and it starts to make more sense. Rowe’s radio, mostly inaudible on the original cut, rises to the surface again and again here, as his found sounds pull the album towards pop art. From the flurries of Arabic dance tunes on “Ailantus Glandulosa” to the shades of Roy Orbison that blow through “In The Realm Of Nothing Whatever”, his transistor dominates the added tracks, reshaping the whole disc. What had sounded nightmarish becomes comic, with snippets of bootlicking talk radio (“The Romans call it gravitas… Mister Heath is well aware of what is going on”) turning AMMMusic into an absurdist soundtrack to the banalities and bullshit of late 60s London.

AMM
“The Great Hall 2”
From Laminal
(Matchless) 1996

A neglected standout in the AMM vault – unreleased until the Laminal triple CD in 1996 – this 1982 recording was the group’s first show with John Tilbury to be caught on tape. Early on, Rowe’s terrifying modified guitar sound dominates, but “The Great Hall” also sneaks in some of his most memorable radio activity. There are more brilliant pop art moments, especially on the first half of the CD, as tattered scraps of The Beatles and Martha Reeves threaten to derail the trio. It’s the ending that’s truly magical, though: eight minutes from time, Rowe’s shortwave receiver suddenly trips onto an eerie German voice, intoning a string of numbers. 15 years before The Conet Project, here was a musician capturing the hidden soundtrack of the Cold War, letting the chatter of espionage rush through a concert hall.

AMM
“Aria”
From Before Driving To The Chapel We Took Coffee With Rick And Jennifer Reed
(Matchless) 1997

“Aria” is the perfect title for this hushed little track, the centrepiece of an April 1996 gig in Houston. In a haze of bowed percussion and sparse piano, Rowe’s radio starts to sneak through the right channel: slowly, bit by bit, the voice of Billie Holiday drifts into focus. It’s an uncanny moment, capturing the haunted energy of radio: she was there, in the air, all along... it just took Rowe’s antenna for us to hear her. I think of this disc whenever I read Frank O’Hara’s famous lines about the late singer, with his memory of “leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT/while she whispered a song along the keyboard/to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing”.

Keith Rowe & John Tilbury
“Olaf”
From Duos For Doris
(Erstwhile) 2003

This set picks up and deepens the link between radiowaves and spirits, an association that’s been in the air since day one (inventor Guglielmo Marconi supposedly spent his dying days trying to construct a spirit phone, opening lines of communication between the living and the dead). Duos For Doris is just as ghostly as “Aria”, but here the séance is more personal, as the two musicians join forces to remember Tilbury’s recently deceased mother. “Olaf” opens with the faint sound of ballroom schmaltz crackling through waves of static, while birds sing through the studio window. As a way of channelling an elderly spirit, the effect is a little like Leyland Kirby’s work as The Caretaker, but softer and more fleeting. Touchingly, rather than following along with Rowe’s radio relics, Tilbury turns to the birds instead, tracing their calls across the upper keys of his piano.

[N:Q]
“November”
November Quebec
(Esquilo) 2006

You can tell just by glancing at Rowe’s cover painting – a cartoonish hand spinning a dial – that you’re in for more radio action. This album is credited to [N:Q], a quartet that Rowe formed with Will Guthrie, Manu Leduc and Julien Ottavi, and features two long tracks:the first is a Rowe solo, the second given to the other three members. Rowe’s piece “November” playfully inverts the approach of most of the tracks above, as he decides to steer clear of music and speech, and to imitate an ‘off-station’ instead, filling the disc with rustling, hissing frequencies. The track was originally broadcast live on Jet 91.2 FM (based in Nantes, France), and it seems that Rowe is playing a mischievous trick on any listeners scrolling through the dial searching for the station: he makes it, and himself, melt away into static and dead air.

Keith Rowe
“Untitled”
From The Room Extended
(Erstwhile) 2016

A vast box, stretching across four hours, The Room Extended is also strangely claustrophobic, more closed and programmatic than the recordings above. Rather than letting the airwaves surprise him, Rowe picks at a set of fixed reference points, offsetting his contact-miked guitar and electronics with a private canon of European classical music. Compared to his more outward-looking live shows, this is the sound of a specific domestic space and the tunes that the elderly artist spins in it. Late on, though, in the final minutes of disc four, an Islamic call to prayer (heard fleetingly across earlier discs) returns, followed by snippets of talk radio and pop, as a final flurry of shortwave radio noise makes its way across the speakers. This quiet surprise hints at yet another way to think about the invisible frequencies that pass through our walls: Rowe signs off his grandest project not with solitary transcendence but with news, as his room is filled with stories of stormed embassies and burning flags.

Our special Radio Activity feature can be found in The Wire 499. Subscribers can read the feature at our online archive, where you can also find Philip Clark's user's guide to AMM.